FreeBSD 8.1 provides evolutionary open source software upgrade

FreeBSD 8.1 has been released, and Sean Michael Kerner from serverwatch.com spoke to Josh Paetzel, iXsystems IT director, about this latest release.

“Putting out new releases of OS software isn’t always about adding major new features — sometimes it’s just about making existing features usable and stable. In the case of the open source software FreeBSD, that’s certainly the case with the newly hatched 8.1 release.

FreeBSD 8.1 is the latest version of the popular BSD server operating system, an update that provides some incremental improvements over the 8.0 release, which debuted in 2009. The FreeBSD 8.1 release might also spur users of older versions of FreeBSD to migrate to the new platform.

“FreeBSD 8.1 isn’t introducing many new features in FreeBSD 8.x. A dot zero release provides a starting point for migrating existing production systems to a new branch, and as production systems are moved to the new branch problems are discovered, bugs unveiled, and fixes start to happen.”

Josh Paetzel said

[…]

Among the new innovations included in last year’s FreeBSD 8.0 release was a production ready version of the ZFS filesystem, technology originally developed by Sun Microsystems and now owned by Oracle. FreeBSD has had experimental support for ZFS since theFreeBSD 7.0 release in February 2008. Paetzel noted that as systems moved to the FreeBSD 8.0 release, bugs and issues in ZFS surfaced that have now been fixed in the FreeBSD 8.1 release.

Paetzel added that the FreeBSD 8.1 release also includes numerous driver updates and fixes for Intel NICs , LSI RAID and HBA controllers.”